Robotic Nation Evidence

2.28.2005

Robots at Wal-Mart

"Auto manufacturing is a highly capital intensive industry, where enormous sums are invested in machines and technology that make the output per worker very high. Retailing is the opposite," Scott said. "A single Ford worker might operate dozens of computer-controlled robots that assemble a car. In a Wal-Mart store, hundreds of associates are helping customers find what they need and check-out fast.

"Due to these differences in the nature of the business, sales and profit per employee - which go far to explain what levels of wages are sustainable in any business - are much lower in retail than auto-making,'' Scott said.

Those "hundreds of associates" will all be unemployed soon. It will be fascinating to see what happens as we enter the era of the completely robotic Wal-Mart. See Robots in 2015 for details.

2.27.2005

Better battery breakthrough?

Altair Nanotechnologies, Inc. announced today that it has achieved a breakthrough in Lithium Ion battery electrode materials, which will enable a new generation of rechargeable battery to be introduced into the marketplace, as well as create new markets for rechargeable batteries. These new materials allow rechargeable batteries to be manufactured that have three times the power of existing Lithium Ion batteries at the same price and with recharge times measured in a few minutes rather than hours.

If true, then this should do a lot to help robots, as well as laptops, PDAs, cell phones and electric cars. A 300% increase in battery life would be a huge breakthrough in an industry that normally sees only about a 5% increase each year.

2.24.2005

Robotic limb replacements

A new research agenda set out by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) aims to restore some of the lost functionality for these soldiers by developing advanced prosthetics that look, feel, and act like the limbs they replace.

The ultimate goal would is limbs that would work well enough to play piano and live normal daily lives.

The keys to better limbs are precise neural control, lots of small but strong motors and a small power source that can hold up all day. That will be a challenge given the amount of space available in a forearm, for example.

2.23.2005

FIRST robotics competition

Last year I was able to go to the FIRST robotics competition in Atlanta. You can read my article on it Here. You can also learn more about FIRST, the robots and the annual competition in this 4-part video:

Right about now, the teams of students for this year's competition are finishing their robots and packing them up for regional competitions. There are lots of press releases and news stories starting to surface.

The thing that is amazing about FIRST is that high school students are building highly mobile, articulate and rugged robotic chassis on shoestring budgets. And it is not "one or two" high school students -- it is thousands of them. And they are doing it on a 6-week timeline.

If you want to see videos on this year's challenge, go to this page and scroll down toward the bottom.

If you have a chance to go to the competition in Atlanta or one of the regional competitions, you should consider it. It is pretty amazing.

Here are some of the articles coming out right now on various FIRST teams:

Robotic spiders

Advanced robot spiders like those seen in the movie Minority Report are closer to reality than you think. In one scene, a robot detects Tom Cruise, the hero, under a manhole, so it lifts the lid and got all the other robots to jump in. This kind of high-level sophisticated communications between robots may seem like science fiction, but in Singapore, local researchers are already close to making them a reality.

2.21.2005

Robots in the ocean

Scientists will soon be able to monitor the deep-sea full time from the comfort of their own living rooms. A test system, scheduled for Monterey Bay this fall, will use a cable the size of an average garden hose to bring power and Internet connectivity to the ocean. These new power outlets in the sea will allow complex instruments and robotic vehicles to stay in the water and "plug in" – sending data back to shore in real time without being connected to the surface. Scientists and engineers hope that this new technology will allow us to wire the entire ocean basins in the future.

2.19.2005

More on robotic soldiers

The Pentagon is spending $161 billion on a program to build heavily-armed robots for the battlefield in the hope that future wars will be fought without the loss of its soldiers' lives.

That is the stated purpose. But later in the article the true reason comes down to jobs:

While the cost of the scheme is huge, it may ultimately save large sums of money. Professional soldiers, their dependents and pensions are pricey. Once robotic technology is developed, the Americans say, the cost of a robot soldier might be only 10 per cent that of its human counterpart.

There is no mention in the article about what will happen to the millions of soldiers and support personnel whose jobs will be completely eliminated by the flood of robots into the military. With this same process happening throughout the economy, it is very unclear what people will do for employment. See also:

2.18.2005

Robotic demolition

Robots suspended from cranes will help demolish the skeleton of one of Madrid's tallest buildings destroyed by a weekend fire because the ruin is too dangerous to be handled by workers, city authorities said Friday.

Walking robots

The most advanced commercial robots, including Honda's humanoid bot, Asimo, typically require a multitude of motors and sensors in each joint - as well as powerful adaptive software - to remain steady while walking.

But the new bots instead use simple mechanical dynamics and minimal motorisation to stride along. The shape of each robot's frame and joints naturally enable them to walk along without requiring much exertion. A similar fundamental simplicity underlies the way in which humans walk.

One thing that the Robotic nation article points out is that the humanoid bodyform will be the preferred platform for robots. Part of that is human vanity, and part of it is the fact that the humanoid form makes it easier for robots to "fit in" to the human world -- they will be able to climb stairs, ride escalators, get in and out of trucks more easily, etc. Engineers will figure out things like walking, and then the price of the basic "humanoid chassis" will fall to the point where it is extremely inexpensive.

Robotic platforms

Japan's preoccupation with consumer robots is largely driven by economic imperatives. It has an aging population, declining birthrates and a looming labor shortage, which means that the development of a standard robot platform could simply be a matter of time.

2.16.2005

Robots on the battlefield

Robots will fight alongside human soldiers in the US military in less than a decade, hunting and killing enemies in combat, military planners say. “Robots are a crucial part of the Army’s effort to rebuild itself as a 21st century fighting force,” The New York Times said, quoting top military planners.

A $127-billion project called Future Combat Systems, the biggest military contract in American history, is also in the pipeline. The costs of that transformation will help drive the defence department’s budget up almost 20%, from a requested $419.3 billion for next year to $502.3 billion in 2010, excluding the costs of war.

2.15.2005

Robots at work

But the robot world is changing fast. Helped by the tumbling price of computing power and by navigation technologies such as the global positioning system (GPS), today's industrial robots can move around in the world. Instead of working on tasks presented to them by moving conveyors, mobile robots are going where the work needs doing.

Consumers are already warming to robots that vacuum floors and mow lawns. Meanwhile university researchers are developing industrial robots that go beyond the three D's to jobs that require significant ability to make independent decisions. They include inspecting an underground pipeline as natural gas flows though it, navigating rugged desert terrain without a driver, and even walking on water while testing for pollutants. For a glimpse at what's coming in mobile robotics, FORTUNE visited a place that's always hopping with wild ideas: the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

2.14.2005

The details of robotic vision

The Robotic Nation article points out that the main problem with robotic vision right now is the fact that it requires vast amounts of computing power -- power that is not going to be inexpensively available for perhaps 10 to 20 years, but will then be available in abundance. This article is technical, but offers a nice example of why you need so much computing power:

We want to focus on the first step because it sometimes consumes a large part of the overall runtime. In this step, color-depth is being reduced. For traffic signs, only some color information (in other words, red, blue, yellow) or so called noncolor information (black or white) are relevant. Each pixel comes from the image sensor with a color depth of 24 bits (RGB coded). After reduction the color depth is just three bits. This speeds up the application because we have to handle less data. Afterwards, it's helpful to enhance image quality using filter operators.

These operators are partially used on every pixel and their nearest neighbors. The median operator, for example, improves the quality of the image by reducing noise. Using it on the whole image makes it necessary to sort nine data values for each pixel, as shown in Figure 3. That means that nine data values have to be sorted perhaps a million times or more.

Octopus Arms for robots

When hunting and grabbing dinner, the octopus uses all the flexibility the arm is capable of. But to bring captured prey to its mouth, the octopus turns the arm into a semi-rigid structure that bends to form quasi joints. Just as a human arm has joints at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist that allow our arms to bend and rotate, the octopus bends its arm to forming three segments of roughly equal length.

Understanding how the octopus controls eight flexible arms all at once could be the basis for developing the next generation of flexible robotic arms—long a goal among robotics engineers.

SmarterChild conversations

SmarterChild is an interactive agent built by Conversagent, Inc. Interactive agents are software applications, often called "bots," that interact with users on Instant Messaging or other text messaging services. You can "chat" with an interactive agent, whether on the web, over IM, or on a wireless device, the same way you talk to any other contact. To talk with SmarterChild, just send him a message saying "hi!"

Also:

Conversagent-powered interactive agents are built with BuddyScript technology and the BuddyScript SDK (Software Development Kit) is now available! If you are an online developer, we hope you'll download the SDK and start creating your own interactive agent now.

2.12.2005

Digitzed people and the end of doctors

To Peter Hunter, the future of medicine looks like this: You visit your doctor after weeks of feeling fatigued and lethargic. She takes a blood sample, records your DNA profile, does a quick CT body scan, then uploads the raw data to a workstation. Within minutes, software stitches together a head-to-toe living, breathing digital reproduction of your innards, which the doc can poke and prod just like the real thing. Turns out you have lung cancer. Rather than focusing on one treatment, your physician can test various scenarios on your digital doppelgänger - surgery, radiation, chemotherapy - and watch how your system reacts. The cure is the simulation that doesn't kill the virtual you.

This actually sounds really cool. But what it means is that AI and robots will be taking over the role of doctors even more quickly, putting most doctors out of work. See also:

Haptics: Shaking Hands with a Robot

Small wonder that other thinkers are taking time out to ponder what all this means. They run the gamut from Ray Kurzweil (whose book The Age of Spiritual Machines draws an optimistic picture of humans embracing a cyborg destiny) to Marshall Brain (whose Robotic Nation site warns that full human membership in a world of robots means that at least half of us will get the idle time we have been hoping for—only we'll get it in the unemployment line).

I recommend the Robotic Nation essay site to those who haven't already looked it over, not because I agree with all he says, but because if ever I saw a site that will make almost anyone want to argue, this is it. But whether you end up grousing about Brain's vision of the future that includes unemployment rates of 50 percent, his proposed social engineering, or his view of the technology, you'll have to agree that he has an important point: Investing some thought up front in how robots will change our society might be a good plan.

According to Marshall Brain, android development pretty well hinges on developing adequate processing power and identifying vision algorithms for interpreting what is artificially "seen." I'm not convinced that they are the only issues holding us back. The world of robotics is dealing with plenty of other challenges. Among them is the need for bots to lift something as heavy as, say, a bowl of cereal, manipulate it the way that humans can (pouring in the milk, taking it to the table), and neither squeeze it till it breaks nor drop it so it shatters. We have a ways to go yet in that direction. And that, of course, brings us to robot haptics—and what they can do right now that is helping to propel us into our brave new robotic world.

RFID tags on students

The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move. Some parents are outraged, fearing it will rob their children of privacy.

The badges introduced at Brittan Elementary School on January 18 rely on the same radio frequency and scanner technology that companies use to track livestock and product inventory.

2.11.2005

Carnegie Mellon ready for Grand Challenge 2

Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team (www.redteamracing.org) has entered two driverless HUMMERS in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 175-mile, winner-take-all desert race for robots, scheduled to take place Oct. 8, 2005. The first machine to reach the finish line within 10 hours wins a prize of $2 million. There is no second place....

A key component of this 2005 contest is a five-minute competitive video prepared by each team to showcase their racing skills. Judges will use these videos to determine which applicants (and there are well over 100 at this time) earn site visits from DARPA in May 2005.The results of those visits will determine the teams that will advance to the Grand Challenge qualifiers.

Cell processor crushes other CPUs

IBM, Sony and Toshiba unveiled more details about their much anticipated Cell processor that is said to crush the performance of current AMD and Intel processors. The chip likely will debut in the Playstation 3 and top clock speeds of 4 GHz....

The basic structure of the chip is comprised out of one 64-bit PowerPC chip and eight "synergistic processing units" (SPEs), the firms said. The PowerPC processor will integrate 32 kByte L1 and 512 kByte L2 cache, while the SPEs will use 256 KByte cache.

Scorpion robot for exploration

Planetary rovers may soon have an eight-legged mechanized side-kick to help them explore distant planets. The Scorpion robot is able to descend steep cliffs, climb rough terrain, and squeeze into crannies that are inaccessible to larger, wheeled vehicles.

The dog-sized prototype is the brainchild of Frank Kirchner, a robotics specialist at the University of Bremen in Germany. It is currently being evaluated at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

ABB Robots

"In assessing payback, Smith says non-financial issues, such as health and safety savings should be considered along with direct financial benefits. He claims safety is a major non-financial driver for the automotive industry's use of robotics.

'It's to do with repeatability for RSI (repetitive stress injuries) issues, and also danger as car materials are getting stronger,' Smith told Manufacturers Monthly.

'With materials getting stronger, it takes longer to weld and there's more expulsion. The end effect is that you can't have a guy standing there welding, otherwise he would have to be protected in full leather.'

For materials handling, Smith says restrictions governing the maximum weight operators may lift make automation essential in some processes."

2.08.2005

Predator vehicles killing people

Pilots more than 7,000 [miles] away in Nevada, control the unmanned planes from their post at Nellis Air Force Base. Their sophisticated cockpits resemble a high-priced video game.

Predator crews, which have a pilot and sensor operator, run the craft 24 hours, rotating in three-hour shifts. Predator teams are trained to look for signs of insurgent activity such as the planting of roadside bombs.

From this description you can imagine a very different kind of warfare in the not-too-distant future. Imagine 150,000 soldiers, but they are not stationed in Iraq. They are living in the United States and telecommuting from home. Instead of personaly being on the battlefield, they pilot vehicles remotely that act as their proxies -- planes, robotic soldiers, missile launchers, etc. There is no family stress, no dying in battle, no friendly fire.

Then, as the technology becomes available in 2025 or 2030, all of those vehicles become completely autonomous and no longer need human drivers.

Robotic Attack Jets

Eventually such planes will be military mainstays. Of this, most observers are sure; it is simply a lot less expensive—and safer—to send machines into battle than to send people, who require food, sleep, training, and pay. Humans can only tolerate so much G-force and are prone to error; unmanned aircraft have the potential to be more dependable. Already, lone unmanned planes—with humans at the remote controls—are widely used for surveillance. But the next crop of planes will fly in coordinated groups, with more autonomy. They’ll tackle jobs such as attacking enemy air defenses, identifying new targets, and releasing precision bombs. “The long-range vision is that the president will wake up some day and decide he doesn’t like the cut of someone’s jib and send thither infinite numbers of myrmidons—robotic warriors—and that we could wage a war in which we wouldn’t put at risk our precious skins” is how John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a leading defense policy website, puts it.

2.07.2005

Moore's law and processors

Advance reports suggest the chip is significantly more powerful and versatile than the next generation of micro-processors announced by the consortium's competitors, Intel and AMD.

The two leading chipmakers are just moving from 32-bit to 64-bit computing and to dual-core processors essentially two “brains” on a single chip.Cell is understood to have at least four cores and be significantly faster than Intel and AMD chips.

“This is probably going to be one of the biggest industry announcements in many years,” said Richard Doherty, president of the Envisioneering research firm. “It's going to breathe new life into the industry and trigger fresh competition.”

2.05.2005

A.I. researchers struggle with human toll of automation

As the limitless advantages and huge impact of artificial intelligence on the business world are slowly gaining acceptance, ethical questions arise concerning the impact such technologies could have on the labor market.

According to the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, A.I., is "the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines."

2.04.2005

Moore's law and discs

Six companies, including Fuji Photo and CMC Magnentics, have formed a consortium to promote HVD technology, which will let consumers conceivably put a terabyte (1TB) of data onto a single optical disc.

Armed 'robo-soldier' set for Iraq

Military officials like to compare the roughly one metre high robots favourably to human soldiers: They don't need to be trained, fed or clothed. They can be boxed up and warehoused between wars. They never complain. And there are no letters to write home if they meet their demise in battle.

2.03.2005

Taking AI to the next level

Narrowing that cognitive gap between humans and machines — creating a computer that can read and learn at a sophisticated level — is a big goal of artificial intelligence researchers.

The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA, granted a contract worth at least $400,000 last fall to two Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professors who are trying to build a machine that can learn by reading.

Chances are that the PhDs at Google are way ahead of DARPA on this one...

Robots for the blind

"Simply speaking, we are trying to develop a robot for use as a mobile grocery cart used for the blind in supermarkets," he said. "The robot would meet the blind person at the door and, by the push of a button, would lead the person to different areas of the store."

2.01.2005

Moore's Law marches on

HP said in a statement that the technology could result in computers that are thousands of times more powerful than those that exist today.

"We are reinventing the computer at the molecular scale," said Stan Williams, one of the authors of the paper, in a statement. "The crossbar latch provides a key element needed for building a computer using nanometer-sized devices that are relatively inexpensive and easy to build."